U.S. Pat. No. 4,674,834 issued June 23, 1987, discloses a page scanner employing a noncoherent fiber optic bundle in which fibers extend from a linear entrance field to a rectangular exit field. The bundle is called "noncoherent" because there is no established or predetermined relationship between the ends of the fibers in the exit field and the corresponding ends of the fibers in the entrance field. The rectangular exit field is coupled to a corresponding photo-sensor array having a significantly larger number of sensors compared to the number of fibers.
The determination of a sequence of sensors of the sensor array to correspond to the sequence of fiber ends (viz: pixels) in the entrance field is carried out electronically. This determination is made during an initialization procedure where the exit field is imaged onto an array of discrete sensors and a light slit is moved along the entrance field in a manner to establish a lookup table for a subset of the sensors of the array which corresponds to the sequence of pixels in the entrance field. Thus, the lookup table organizes the electronic signals exiting the sensor array to match the organization of pixels in the entrance field.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,762,391 issued Aug. 9, 1988 disclosed one initialization procedure for such a scanner. The procedure employs a light slit which is moved incrementally along the entrance field of the bundle. The sensor array is read out for each slit position and a computer algorithm selects a representative sensor address for each of the sequence of pixels. The procedure requires several minutes to complete. Although in production a fairly large number of scanners can be initialized at the same time, thus reducing the average time required for an initialization procedure, it is desirable to reduce the time required for a single scanner as much as possible.